# Experimental and theoretical advances in prosody A review **Abstract:** NIH-PA Author Manuscript Research on prosody has recently become an important focus in various disciplines, including Linguistics, Psychology, and Computer Science. This article reviews recent research advances on two key issues: prosodic phrasing and prosodic prominence. Both aspects of prosody are influenced by linguistic factors such as syntactic constituent structure, semantic relations, phonological rhythm, pragmatic considerations, and also by processing factors such as the length, complexity or predictability of linguistic material. Our review summarizes recent insights into the production and perception of these two components of prosody and their grammatical underpinnings. While this review only covers a subset of a broader set of research topics on prosody in cognitive science, they are representative of a tendency in the field toward a more interdisciplinary approach. Prosody can be roughly defined as a level of linguistic representation at which the acousticphonetic properties of an utterance vary independently of its lexical items. This admittedly vague definition encompasses a variety of phenomena: emphasis, pitch accenting, intonational breaks, rhythm, and intonation. Some aspects of the prosody of an utterance are mere reflexes of processing during speech production, others have been conventionalized and encode grammatical information. In this article, we focus on two aspects of prosody that are central in current research: boundary strength and relative promi **Authors:** [[Author Manuscript]]